Shahram Mokri brings his radical formal language to a veiled meditation on freedom and unmasking
Black Rabbit, White Rabbit: Shahram Mokri’s Cinema of Controlled Revelation
Iranian filmmaker Shahram Mokri has spent his career constructing what critics have come to recognize as a singular cinematic language — one built around extreme long takes, precisely timed edits that defy conventional narrative rhythm, and a formal architecture that places as much weight on the act of watching as on the story being watched. His 2025 film “Black Rabbit, White Rabbit,” which premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea and was reviewed by Iranian critic and filmmaker Pouya Aghelizadeh for High on Films, extends that language into new thematic territory. The film has been read by its critics as a political allegory for Iran’s contemporary social reality, particularly the movement for women’s rights that has reshaped public life since the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. Whether or not Mokri intends that reading, the film provides the formal conditions for it.
The Language of the Long Take
“Black Rabbit, White Rabbit” opens with a woman completely wrapped in bandages. The camera accompanies her in an unbroken shot. The first and most sustained formal question the film poses is simple: where will the cut come? For an audience conditioned by conventional découpage — the grammar of shot/reverse shot, the invisible editing that maintains narrative continuity — the deliberate withholding of a cut functions as a kind of productive frustration. Mokri’s films, including “Fish and Cat” (2013) and “Invasion” (2017), have been built around similar structural principles. His use of the long take is not ornamental but constitutive: it changes the nature of the audience’s relationship to what they are watching. Aghelizadeh invokes the concept of “dead time” as developed in the cinema of Wim Wenders to describe the effect, while noting that Mokri’s use of this device functions differently — oriented less toward a revelatory engagement with environment and more toward a kind of controlled suspense. The result is an audience that waits, actively, for the moment when the filmmaker will decide to cut. That moment, when it comes, carries weight that a conventional edit would not.
The Political Reading
The film’s imagery offers multiple entry points for symbolic interpretation. A bandage that covers and eventually reveals. A magician’s hat from which a rabbit emerges. The face veil of women whose removal, in the film’s visual logic, suggests emergence and transformation. Aghelizadeh, writing as the first Iranian to see the film at Busan, identifies these as a connected set of symbols pointing toward birth and liberation — images of something enclosed becoming something free. “Black Rabbit, White Rabbit may be read as the filmmaker’s manifesto against the establishment of a patriarchal society, and as an expression of the powerful countercurrent unfolding today,” Aghelizadeh writes. The film features actress Hasti Maali and a cast that includes Babak Karimi, Kibriyo Dilyobova, and Bezhan Davlyatov. Its production, by Negar Eskandarfar, placed it squarely within the tradition of Iranian independent cinema that has continued to produce formally ambitious work despite the ongoing constraints placed on filmmaking by the Islamic Republic. That filmmakers like Mokri continue to find ways to articulate political and social commentary through formal means rather than direct address is itself a reflection of the conditions under which Iranian cinema operates.
Formalism as Political Act
Iranian cinema’s international reputation rests substantially on directors who have developed distinctive personal languages — Abbas Kiarostami’s recursive structures, Jafar Panahi’s reflexive documentary gestures, Asghar Farhadi’s narrative precision. Mokri belongs to a younger generation that inherits this tradition while pushing its formal experiments further. What makes his work worth studying for screenwriters and directors is the argument it embodies: that the way a film is organized — its editing logic, its relationship to time, its treatment of the viewer’s expectation — is not separate from its meaning but is itself a primary vehicle for meaning. The screenplay for “Black Rabbit, White Rabbit,” which Mokri wrote, is by his own account designed for restraint — to create the conditions under which the cinematography and editing can carry the film’s actual weight. That relationship between the written page and the formal decisions that follow it represents an advanced model of how cinema can work. For those wishing to explore the formal tradition from which Mokri’s work emerges, the Criterion Collection maintains extensive context on Iranian cinema at Criterion Collection. The history of Iranian cinema and its political dimensions are documented by the FIPRESCI international critics federation. The Busan International Film Festival, where the film premiered, remains Asia’s most significant platform for new cinema and publishes ongoing coverage at Busan International Film Festival.
